Google Says It’s Removing Its Name from Mobile URLs

The now familiar Google AMP prefix won’t be around much longer, as the search engine aims to remove its name from publisher URLs…

The Google AMP prefix is going away, being replaced by publishers’ own mobile URLs. Google announced it’s making changes to how accelerated mobile pages work. Currently, end-users see such mobile addresses like google.com/amp/www.xanjero.com… But by mid-year, the search giant will remove its namesake AMP prefix, displaying instead the publishers own mobile URL.

Google AMP Prefix to Change to Publisher Mobile URL

Google explains it employed the format to make pages load faster. “When we first launched AMP in Google Search we made a big trade-off: to achieve the user experience that users were telling us that they wanted, instant loading, we needed to start loading the page before the user clicked.”

For those unfamiliar, AMP or accelerated mobile pages provide stripped down versions of the original pages. AMP content loads at a fraction of the time but it has some limitations. For instance, it might not display images or certain web properties.

Due to privacy reasons, the company can’t load pages directly from publishers’ servers. Instead, AMP content loads right from the Google AMP Cache, making it super fast. But, this comes at a cost. Firstly, it places the Google name in front of the publisher. Secondly, it makes it more difficult to share links via social media.

Now, Google is currently working on what it calls “the emerging Web Packaging standard.” It aims to offer the same level of privacy and performance. But, it does not alter the original URL.

The company states it expects to remove the Google AMP prefix by the second half of this year.